{"id":62,"date":"2010-05-06T19:54:54","date_gmt":"2010-05-06T19:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dvanonline.wordpress.com\/?p=62"},"modified":"2018-10-14T22:05:13","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T05:05:13","slug":"bui-thac-chuyens-choi-voi-adrift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dvan.org\/2010\/05\/bui-thac-chuyens-choi-voi-adrift\/","title":{"rendered":"Bui Thac Chuyen\u2019s Choi\u00a0Voi\u00a0(Adrift)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just saw Bui Thac Chuyen’s film Choi Voi <\/em>(Adrift<\/em>) at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Bui Thac Chuyen is the director of Song Trong So <\/em>Hai<\/em> (Living in Fear,<\/em> 2005), which is a terrific movie about a South Vietnamese veteran in Viet Nam after the war whose only way of making a living is to dig up buried landmines. After every successful de-mining, he’s so thrilled to be alive he has to make love to his wife. You can see the trailer<\/a> and read more about it in Vietnamese<\/a> or in English<\/a>. Living in Fear<\/em> was a visceral movie that presented a view of the war and its after effects seen rarely in Vietnamese cinema and never at all in American cinema. The same talent is on display in Adrift<\/em>, but the look of the film and the narrative are very, very different. Adrift<\/em> is about a mismatched newlywed couple: the young husband, taxi driver Duy Khoa Nguyen, a mama’s boy, and his wife, Do Thi Hai Yen (seen in The Quiet American<\/em> and The Story of Pao<\/em>), not yet aware of her sexuality until she runs into the Vietnamese\/Viet Kieu hearth-throb Johnny Tri Nguyen (getting better with every film).<\/p>\n